Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:16:33 GMT
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<TITLE>The Metacat Project, Douglas Hofstadter, Jim Marshall</TITLE>

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<H2><B>Metacat: a Self-Watching Cognitive Architecture for Analogy-Making</B></H2>
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The Metacat project is an attempt to computationally model certain key
aspects of human cognition.  It has its foundations in an earlier
project called Copycat, a computer model of high-level perception and
analogy-making.  The central theme underlying Copycat is the idea of
nondeterministic, stochastic processing distributed among a large
number of small computational agents, which work on different aspects
of an analogy problem simultaneously, at different speeds, thereby
achieving a kind of differential parallelism.  All processing occurs
through the collective actions of many agents working together,
without any higher-level, executive process directing the overall
course of events.  Thus, Copycat lies firmly within the paradigm of
emergent computation.  At the same time, however, it incorporates many
ideas from the more traditional paradigm of symbolic AI, inhabiting a
kind of middle ground between these two opposites.  Current research
is concerned with extending the model in a way that will allow it to
create much richer representations of the analogies it makes.  This
involves the idea of `self-watching' -- the ability to perceive and
remember patterns that occur in its own processing as it solves
analogy problems.  Based on this ability, Metacat will be able to
understand and explain its answers in a way that Copycat cannot, and
will eventually be able to perceive analogies between analogies.
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<B>Associated Faculty:</B>  Douglas Hofstadter
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<B>Associated Graduate Students:</B>  Jim Marshall
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<B>Affiliated Projects:</B>  Letter Spirit (Douglas Hofstadter & John Rehling)
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<B>Support:</B>
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This research is supported by funding for the Center for Research on
Concepts and Cognition (CRCC) provided by the IU College of Arts and
Sciences.

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